Now

Updated June 2025

Day-to-day: Expert Software Engineer at Optum.

I work on building ground-breaking capabilities into EMIS' market-leading patient management platform EMIS-X for GPs and clinicians in the UK.

Current picks: #

Reading 📚

Really in to audiobooks, but also redescovering the tactile reading experience of print:

• An Elegant Puzzle, Will Larson

• Staff Engineer, Will Larson

• Accelerate

• I Love you, Byeee

• An Emotional Education, Alain de Botton, School of Life 💭

• A Therapeutic Journey, Alain de Botton, School of Life 💭 , Alain de Botton, School of Life

Classics which I frequently reflect on and are my compass for life and work:

• Atomic Habits 🍬, James Clear

• Deep Work 🧠, Cal Newport

• The Meditations 🔥, Marcus Aurelius

Podcasts 🎧

• Soft skills Engineering
• Book Overflow
• Beyond Coding
• Blindboy Podcast

Videos and presentations ▶️▶️

These have stuck with me recently and informing what practices I bring to my team and how I navigate my career

• Kent Beck, Tidy First - GOTO Conf 2024

• Martin Fowler Interview: Refactoring - Book Overflow pod

Thinking about

• How I can help my team to implement some of the ideas from Accelerate, challenge established thinking and working which no longer serve us in our journey toward CI/CD and TBD. I want to coach us to be brave enough to realise the benefits of optimising for feedback; reducing hand offs, hidden work, and latency by using PRs.

• Trusting in myself and my experience, and step up to the challenges I see around me. I'm developing my ambition, bravery and resilience to feel empowered in myself to to pursue what I want to.

If there is no passion and personal investment given to something in a company, mediocrity prevails.

Inertia is all around us, and few will step up to the challenge of right action at personal risk, but that is not an exciting, impactful way to live...

I go to work to have impact and improve things; the product, our daily work, our mission. But there is heavy inertia I care enough to overcome.

• Develop a reputation for consistency; good or bad. Just always predictable in my responses and actions, to build trust and clear communication.

• Being deliberate with how I spend time. Having systematically cutting out much 'low value' time sinks and unplugging from social media, there is much time available. I need to be deliberate with using it to foster meaningful relationships and towards fulfilling things like developing my art skills and reflection on my goals and values

• Challenging myself to draw more, even if it's rubbish, and share it on my drawing instagram martino_draws

Thanks for taking an interest!

My Now page is inspired by Derek Sivers' 'Now' page concept. Find out about Now pages.